POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

In one of the most widely read posts that I have made to this blog, I collected videos and images that have attempted to provide visualizations of the enormous differences between a million, a billion, and a trillion dollars.

These kinds of almost inconceivable numbers have already become a concern as the series of stimulus packages have begun to be passed, with more almost certainly coming. Sooner rather than later, the debt is going to become the primary focus of political contention, and cuts to healthcare, the social safety net, education, and the entitlement programs are going to be pitted against reductions in defense spending and rollbacks of tax reductions as the better approach to addressing that debt.

Most Americans at least subconsciously entertain the notion that they might someday become wealthy, and by “wealthy,” they typically mean becoming millionaires. And for 40 years, the Right has shaped our political dialogue as a contest between those who want to protect earned (and inherited) wealth against those who want to seize that wealth and redistribute it to those who have not earned it.

Wealth inequality has become more pronounced than at any time in our history, largely because the laws ostensibly intended to “protect” personal wealth have actually magnified its advantages.

And yet, many of the working poor are politically as committed as the “one-percent” are to protecting wealth inequality because in the extremely unlikely event that they themselves do become millionaires, they don’t want someone from the government to take a substantial chunk of their sudden wealth. The irony, of course, is that even under the current tax laws, they would probably lose a much larger share of that million dollars or several millions of dollars to taxation than most billionaires do.

But it’s not just the working poor who have bought into this mindset. I recall being chastised in an Ohio Conference board meeting when the scope of Ohio’ Senate Bill 5 was beginning to become clear and we were considering ways in which we might begin to respond to it. If it had not been repealed by referendum, that legislation, quickly introduced, passed, and signed after John Kasich’s inauguration as governor in 2011, would have gutted the bargaining rights of all public employees and completely eliminated the bargaining rights of college and university faculty. But to some degree or other, most of us were still clinging to the idea that more reasonable points of view might prevail. I made what in retrospect seems to have been an extremely guarded suggestion on our messaging, and I was immediately chastised by the.Conference’s president at the time for engaging in “class warfare.” He leveled the charge so quickly that it was clearly reflexive.

Well, take about five minutes to hold down the right scroll arrow on the following visualization of Jeff Bezos’ wealth. I think that it makes it pretty hard to argue that something is not seriously out of whack–a good while before one even gets to the end–and, by the way, I think that it is worth scrolling to the end:

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/.